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Actually I think $40/hr (obviously not a real number) would get quite a large labor migration to the strawberry fields. North Dakota saw a huge influx of out-of
by frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
Actually I think $40/hr (obviously not a real number) would get quite a large labor migration to the strawberry fields. North Dakota saw a huge influx of out-of-work men when oil was booming.
- kelnos 9y agoSure, and then the price of strawberries goes up, and grocery shoppers complain and don't buy them. The US is addicted to cheap goods. In many sectors cheap goods can't be had without cheap labor.
- ng12 9y agoErhm, you can't be addicted to cheap goods if cheap goods don't exist. People weren't any less materialistic in the 60's they just had less cheap stuff to buy. Business push prices down to make more money not because they have to satiate rabid consumers.
- pm24601 9y agoYeap - A real shame if the CEOs had to take a lower paycheck in order to pay their workers more. Yeap - a real shame.
- ams6110 9y agoThere are probably some exceptions but in most businesses you could eliminate the CEO salary altogether and there wouldn't be enough savings to give "the workers" more than a very small raise.
- pm24601 9y ago[Former] Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf made 473 times more than the salary of a median employee, according to Bloomberg. That ratio of CEO-to-employee pay puts Wells Fargo at No. 33 among S&P 500 companies and third highest among financial institutions on the list. He earned $19.3 million in total compensation last year. Add in the other highly paid C-level people in WFC and Split that with the median paid and below employees would mean about $3000/year. For a full-time teller making about $30K/year that is a 10% salary difference. I do call that much more than a "small" raise.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- cottonpicker 9y agoBut the median-wage Wells Fargo employee is a crook who defrauds Wells Fargo employees. It is not right that those employees should profit from abusing customers. Clearly, top-tier executives should be the ones to profit from this.
- pm24601 9y agoCorrection: > Wells Fargo employee is a scapegoat
- kelnos 9y agoRight, but you wouldn't split it equally. You'd split it proportionally based on what each employee actually makes, so the $30k/yr employee would get less than a $3k raise.
- kelnos 9y agoI'm of course fine with CEOs getting lower pay, but is that a realistic outcome?
- pm24601 9y agoYes it is.
- kelnos 9y agoIs it actually realistic, or would you just like it to be? Executives obviously resist downward motion on their salaries, and collectively they have a decent amount of clout: there are enough companies with crazy inflated CxO salaries that if your board doesn't offer what the candidate pool wants, you don't fill that position. I would love to see CxO salaries drop across the board, but I don't see that happening any time soon. And regardless, as other sibling posts point out, firing the CEO and distributing the salary to the rank-and-file wouldn't improve their situation by all that much.
- cottonpicker 9y agoYou are exactly right. But who said that strawberries should be inexpensive and found in every fridge in America? What you have just acknowledged is that strawberries are not cheap. They should not be cheap. The real danger here is not that Americans will be deprived of strawberries. The danger is that some American who does not actually harvest strawberries will not be able to profit so much from strawberries. Their business will be in jeopardy. It is obviously bad for America when we drive businesses out of business. American business people need to be able to have somebody else do all the work very cheaply so that the American business person can profit. If nobody values your product enough to pay its true costs, the answer is to reduce costs by having somebody else work cheaper. If the free market doesn't support cheaper labor costs, you need to use some other method to reduce labor costs. Wielding control of immigration status is one tool to incent cheaper labor.